Neal Cassady and his love of that year Natalie Jackson conscious of their roles in Eternity, Market Street San Francisco. Cassady had been prototype for Kerouac’s late 1940’s ON THE ROAD saga hero, Dean Moriarity, as in later 1960’s he would take the wheel of Ken Kesey’s psychedelic-era Crosscountry bus “”Further.”” His illuminated American Automobile mania and erotic energy had already written his name in bright-lit signs … That’s why we stopped under the marquee to fix the passing hand on the watch, 1955.

The new exhibit at Howard Greenberg’s Gallery is featuring the accomplished photography of noted poet and “beat”, Allen Ginsberg:

Ginsberg started photographing in the 1940s, taking snapshots of his friends and making impromptu pictures in photo booths which were widely popular at the time. (Ginsberg had his film developed at local drugstores and referred to his snapshots as “drugstore” prints.) His experience at Columbia University, surrounded by Kerouac and Burroughs, ignited his creative drive, believing that he and his friends would create “the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art.” Few of these photographs are well-known and were never meant to be shown outside of his group. Yet, they compel the viewer to re-examine the ingrained images we have of the Beats – Ginsberg, the balding, bearded guru or the melancholic Williams Burroughs ravaged by years of heroin use.

For no defined reason, by 1963 Ginsberg stopped photographing, ultimately returning to it in the early 80s. By this time he was a well-known poet who was concerned with preserving his legacy.

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